1776–1781: FROM TWO CHAPTERS TO TWO VOLUMES

It was generally agreed among Gibbon's opponents that what gave offence in chapters 15 and 16 was unrelated to the history he was narrating; so much so that several of them suspected that ‘attacking religion’ was the true purpose of his book and chapters 1 through 14 irrelevant to it. Gibbon of course had historical purposes of his own, though to say this reopens the question of what he was doing in the offensive passages. He was writing a history of empire, in which the history of the Church played an immeasurably important part (none of his critics had yet reached the point of suggesting that he thought Christianity the cause of the Decline and Fall). He went on writing his history and pursuing his purposes, but it was five years before he published his next volumes and resumed his narrative from the point reached at the end of chapter 14. During those years the controversy over the two chapters ran its course to the point so far surveyed, and the image of Gibbon it established – an image partly dominated by the ‘sneer’ – was formed in the minds of readers, where it has persisted ever since. During the same period, however, the purposes with which he was writing were shaped to the point at which we find them in volumes ii and iii of the Decline and Fall, so that these years figure in both the history of Gibbon's authorship and the history of its reception, histories which from 1781 onwards draw increasingly apart.